MiCLUES

The aim of the MiCLUES project is to explore the potential of smart devices to provide dynamic, rich, reconfigurable contexts and paths through the Royal College of Music’s Museum (RCM) collection. The project will take a small sample from the collection to develop proof-of concept demonstrators and evaluate these through visitor surveys.

The digitisation of RCMs collection creates exciting opportunities to improve the experience of visitors to the museum through bespoke apps running on smart devices (e.g. tablets / iphones). These apps could guide a visitor on pathways through the museum according to their interest and link to contextually appropriate resources: for example an instrument may have spoken audio content to describe it. The app could offer additional options to hear recordings of the instrument, recordings of music from the instrument’s historical period, and see related documents and images. The app thus becomes a dynamic, rich, portable context and window into the museum’s larger collection offering a rounded multimedia experience to visitors. Pathways may be curated by museum staff, planned by visitors in advance and downloaded to the device, or perhaps crowd-sourced. Essentially they offer a guided navigation through the mesh of museum resources, artefacts and information, grounded in the physical space of the museum itself, with the physical exhibits as landmarks on the journey. On moving away from the planned path, a return “route” can be supported through dynamically generated thematic pathways (e.g. historical, geographical, stylistic) to provide a richer, user-driven experience of the collection.